Motmot

Let’s talk about this very prettypretty birdbird

Today’s New York Times Spelling Bee letters:

E, H, M, N, O, W, and center T (all words must include T)

Merriam-Webster says…

Silly little dictionary! Don’t you know that motmot can’t possibly be a word if the New York Times says it ain’t?

For further fascinating facts, check out the Spelling Bee Master.

What’s your favorite dord* from today’s puzzle?

My Two Cents

I was surprised to find a photo of a motmot on Unsplash. Well, there was only one, but still. It’s a very colorful little bugger, as you can see from the multitude of hues on the head.

Merriam-Webster’s unabridged and collegiate dictionaries can’t seem to agree on the origin of the word. The former says it comes from the Spanish mot-mot as an imitation of the sound the bird makes, while the latter claims it came from New Latin, momot, motmot… without explaining further.

The Spanish Wikipedia page about the Amazonian motmot (Momotus momota) says that the species name momota comes from the Aztec word momot that was later used by taxonomists to name the bird. (Their reference is Jobling, J. A. (2017). Momotus Key to Scientific Names in Ornithology, but the link does not work.

Color me pretty

The family Momotidae, or motmots, belongs to the same order of colorful birds that includes the kingfishers, bee-eaters, and rollers. Except for the tody motmot, all the others have long tails that sometimes end in a pair of racket-like tips, like the ones seen below.

The above is the Trinidad motmot, which I think is the same bird that appears in the photo at the top of the article. Curiously, its scientific name is Momotus bahamensis, which translates as Bahama Mama.

The racket shape of these tails is a result of the falling off of some of the feathers due to abrasion or during preening, leaving part of the shaft bare and accentuating the tips.

One of the distinctive and interesting things about motmots is that they “wag” their tails back and forth when they sense a predator. This seems counterintuitive, as it would draw attention to them. However, ornithologists think that this signaling can actually help the motmot avoid becoming prey. The predator understands the bird is aware of its intentions and is about to escape; it won’t invest energy in a fruitless pursuit. Meanwhile, the motmot can just hang around.

This is the Amazonian motmot, which I mentioned earlier:

It can be found in the Amazon and the Andean foothills from western Venezuela to eastern Brazil, and even in northeastern Argentina. In Venezuela, where I grew up, it’s known as the “pájaro león”, or lion bird.

Why? I have no clue, but it allows me to segue into…

The tongue gobbler

There is a mid-20th-century legend from Nicaragua about huge flying creatures called pájaro-león and comelenguas. (The latter term translates as “tongue eater”). Sometimes these mythical beings were described as being the same thing.

The stories started popping up in southern Honduras in the 1940s or 1950s. Several peasants swore they saw a huge bird flying over the farms in the area. They also claimed that the day after the sighting, many cows were found dead in a mysterious way.

Later other people said they witnessed how the strange creature swooped down and attacked the cows. They would dislocate the jaws of the poor animal to rip out its tongue. Why the comelenguas would go to all this trouble to eat only tongues is beyond me. Perhaps this mythical creature was a gourmet of sorts.

Some sources say there are even some photos of animals that seem prehistoric and were identified as being the comelenguas. Interestingly, around the same time this was happening in Honduras, similar stories were popping up thousands of miles away in Brazil.

And speaking of popping up… this is the one and only picture that popped up in the online articles about the comelenguas:

So, if you see something like this circling the skies above one day, run… and hold your tongue!

Let’s circle back — bad pun intended — to prettier creatures, like the motmots. Why is that word not included in today’s Spelling Bee game? I don’t know, but the New York Times decided that motmot is a dord.*

You can check out my previous entry on another dord* here:

*What the heck is a dord, you ask? Here’s the answer: